Frank Kermode: 1919-2010

I was thinking about Frank Kermode in the days before I learned, belatedly, from the eulogies printed in the London Review of Books, that he had died. I was trying to reconcile his opinion – oft shared by older college English professors during my undergraduate years – that reading was much more important than writing, with something James Sturm said at SPX: that to be psychologically healthy, you have to create as much media as you take in. Both seem intuitively wise, yet at odds, since nobody who read as much as Kermode could possibly write as much too and yet the breadth and seriousness of Kermode’s reading is surely the kernel of his writing and his contribution to literary study.

Kermode, like most male critics of his generation, tended to articulate a conservative response to the “politicization” of the humanities academy in the 1960s-70s and after. His values, he said, were those of the Enlightenment: disinterestedness, orderly thought, the search for wisdom and perspective. And yet his perspective, and his wisdom, were not all that divergent in their details from the insights of the early- to mid-century philosophy that informs so much of capital-T Theory. He wasn’t particularly conservative politically except in terms of academic politics, and his appreciation for Continental philosophy allowed him to read, and critique, the academic practice of Theory seriously when others of his generation could not. His own writing, especially 1990’s Poetry, Narrative, History deals with issues of narrative structure closely related to those of French narratology. 1965’s The Sense of an Ending prefigures social-science’s notion of a “risk society,” which has been treated frequently by Zizek .

But ever invested in the centrality of reading literature for sense, Kermode somewhat blames the academy’s politicization for society’s loss of sanity:

The history of apocalypse and the developments that it has undergone are very interesting. The craziness that it has engendered is quite important. We perhaps laugh at these sects in America – although not always, as some are very violent and destructive. There is mass attendance, of which we hear nothing about, at these meetings of apocalyptic sects. Absurdities like this business about the faithful being ‘snatched’ from whatever they’re doing, so that aeroplanes might crash because the pilot has been taken to heaven. These people are guilty of a very elementary reading error. They need a good literary critic. They need a commentary on the Book of Revelations that is actually sane – which is of course possible, it’s been done many times.

There was probably never enough power in academic English, even in the days of Leavis and Brooks, to forestall the polemicization of society brought about by mass culture and counterculture. But Kermode’s insistence that literary criticism teaches us to think disinterestedly nonetheless makes us sensitive to some qualities of literary reading that are perhaps overlooked in our hyper-aestheticized, mass culture-saturated society. It is, of course, the same insistence that blinds him, for example, to the similar projects of Terry Eagleton – whom he admired – and Fredric Jameson – whom he did not – but, when taken disinterestedly, it is nonetheless a worthwhile insight that something has been lost in the replacement of literary reading with philosophical reading.

Classical literary training teaches you to read well: to parse sustained sentences and the relational, contingent concepts they represent, to identify metaphors and trace conceits, to recognize allusions – and their transformation into metaphors – to perceive all the things that make literature “complex,” and to perceive those things effortlessly, without the sense that you’re working, so that the experience is pleasurable. But these skills, in the greatest readers, translate to things other than literature: to “disinterestedness and orderly thought.” Philosophical reading, in the continental tradition in particular, is vastly more interested and while orderly, also much more abstract. In the same interview quoted above, Kermode zeroes in on this aspect of theoretical discourse:

when you shift the focus of interest to literary theory, you’re creating a new subject. Someone once said that when you start finding out all the rules (or what I.A. Richards called the philosophy of rhetoric), you get another subject on another level. That level is not higher because it’s more valuable, it’s higher because it’s more abstract. It’s like having a specialist in concrete, a man who is interested in the stresses of the material, but who is no longer interested in the building.

The two passages situate Kermode, the Literary Critic, in the interstices between the two groups he discusses, the academics “no longer interested in the building” and the masses “guilty of an elementary reading error.” Neither is disinterested, and neither can move between the abstract and the concrete. The academics simply inhabit a different society from the masses altogether, each society homogeneous.

For it may well happen that students will keenly disapprove of the known politics or religion of a writer, or seek to discover in his or her work hidden senses of which it might be equally proper to disapprove; and such prejudices may well prevent their actually loving what they read. But they need to learn that excellent poetry may — in fact, almost always must — express political, religious, or social convictions they cannot share. If that were not so, we could not read Homer or Dante or T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound without experiencing constant disagreement, tedium, or even disgust. And I must say that it is an enlivening experience to watch a group of intelligent young people habituating themselves to a poet who offers them very little in the way of instant gratification, to see them thinking through a poem for its own sake, without prejudice. Soon their interests may be widened in scope; they may need to find out more about quaint George Herbert, may even want to ask whether and how quaint Emily Dickinson, who is known to have copied out part of one of his poems, was affected by the English poet. Affection and respect for poetry spread by such means. But first must come the recognition of a certain admirable mastery and the perception of some benefit in recognizing it. As to whether students share Herbert’s Anglican piety or deplore Yeats’s flirtation with fascism, these should be secondary considerations; the direct experience of poetry is what will enrich them. For pedagogues to argue, as in various ways they do, that the political bearing of a work of literature is the most important thing about it — or that it ought first to be studied as just another document in some historical power negotiation — is, in my view, a subversion of their calling.

The logic is ironic, since academic theory often fetishizes difference, and Kermode did soften his stance in the years after the above passage was written in 1997. But the commitment to literature as conversation remains true throughout his career.

So does any of this help me reconcile Kermode’s “reading” with Sturm’s “creation”? I think it does, in the sense that reading for Kermode is not really “taking something in.” An encounter with difference is not easily internalized. The experience of the encounter is what’s taken in, with that “disinterested” distance and care. Sturm’s observation is much more wisdom for a media–saturated age, when consumption is passive, where the pleasures of aesthetic immersion are highly valued, and conversation is among members of homogeneous groups. It is a protection against a world where Kermode’s mode of reading is increasingly difficult, where the materiality of writing and drawing and knitting and baking provide anchors against the dehumanization of mass culture. Kermode’s mode of reading – the classic belletristic mode – is creative in the same life-affirming, humanistic sense as any more tangible, externalized act of creation. Although there is no material output from the act of reading, it can’t knock you out of balance. Or perhaps that balance is itself one outcome of the act of critical, disinterested reading. Kermode may claim the Enlightenment but these values are equally Modern: literature does not need to serve a social purpose or advance a political agenda, it does not need to target a demographic or document a historical moment or express authenticity. It is a pleasure for its own sake, but the pleasure of Kermode’s way of reading is both aesthetic and intellectual: “To read well gives you an enormous kick. That, I feel, is the first necessity.”

19 Comments

I think the easiest way to reconcile them is to get a cushy university job like Kermode; then you’ve got plenty of time to read and write.

Less snarkily perhaps — I find Kermode’s suggestion that students who are bored or annoyed by Ezra Pound’s crazy political views are somehow missing the point of poetry really boring and annoying. There’s this sense that poetry can be abstracted from its content; that what someone says doesn’t matter because…well, why? Because it’s been declared to be literature by someone else? Because Frank Kermode likes it and and he doesn’t want to think about ideology while he’s lost in a sensual fugue of metaphors — a “reading well” that somehow doesn’t include a reaction to content?

Reading well can involve being bored and pissed off. And if reading is creative, it’s precisely to the extent that it includes an engagement with a text which involves, not just pleasure and acquiescence, but dissent and contradiction. Reading which is first and foremost about recognizing “mastery” separate from thinking about what is being talked about — that seems neither aesthetic nor disinterested to me. On the contrary, it seems lazy and self-aggrandizing.

Is it boredom or annoyance that he’s objecting to in that passage? I can see that he would object to bored annoyance on the part of a student, but in the passage he says “constant disagreement, tedium, or disgust,” and tedium isn’t the same thing as boredom. The “constant disagreement and disgust” would have more to do with being unable to imagine where Pound was coming from than with being bored by him and annoyed with him for being boring.

Remember that Kermode isn’t particularly ahistorical or anti-theoretical. He was a major personal advocate for Greenblatt and a supporter of Eagleton and he actually resigned his chaired position at Cambridge in protest when they denied tenure to Colin MacCabe due to his advocacy for teaching structuralism. I think you’re mistaking Kermode for a strict New Critic, which he really wasn’t, at least not by the 70s. He pretty much single-handedly brought British English Studies into the theoretical fold.

But he was always moderate about it, and I think the implication of his point about the apocalypse is that the loss of moderation has contributed to a polarization that actually has very destructive and very real political consequences.

That aside, though, I think his issue is with theoretical and political readings that aren’t tied to close readings, not with theoretical and political readings period. His books are very theoretical, although definitely more formalist than socio-cultural. I’m sure his appreciation for New Historicism stems from the fact that those guys were damn fine close readers as well as subtle historians. It’s a pretty good standard for academia…

I have trouble seeing the distinction between tedium and boredom that you’re drawing. He’s saying students don’t have the right to be bored by Ezra Pound; if they’re bored by him it’s because they’re not good enough readers. And I’m saying, being bored by Ezra Pound is an entirely understandable, and even arguably a laudable reaction. It doesn’t make you a bad reader. It can make you a good one.

I don’t have any ongoing beef with Kermode; I haven’t read much of him. If you say he was more moderate than some, I don’t have any reason to disagree. I do disagree with what he’s saying *here* though. His version of academic moderation and reading as connoisseurship for the transcendently unimplicated makes me itch, and his self-satisfied sneers at the religious right for actually caring about the texts they venerate is not especially compelling either. He’s saying that to read closely is to be above the fray. I think that’s pernicious bullshit, and a big part of what’s wrong with the academy, not what’s right with it.

It’s all just the worship of professionalization, really. If students knew how to read professionally they wouldn’t be bored by Yeats; if fundamentalists knew how to read professionally they wouldn’t think they were going to be raptured up. It rationalizes differences in taste and belief as differences in professional skill and then licks its lips over the skill like a dog congratulating itself for marking out its domain. I find the whole process infuriating.

You realize that trying to defend your approach to “good reading” while simultaneously claiming that “tedium” and “boredom” don’t have meaningfully different connotations makes no sense, right? Close readings are all about catching that kind of difference and understanding how it operates in the writing…

But I can explain the difference as I see it: I define boredom as having to do with something that is just entirely uninteresting subjectively, something I can’t muster the energy for, and tedium as something that requires a steady expenditure of energy and concentration for not a lot of payoff other than just getting the work done, but that I have to do anyway. The OED gives the synonym “wearisome.”

So formatting/laying out a document in InDesign is tedious for me, as it takes steady effort and concentration to execute but not much effort to understand and the understanding doesn’t evolve much over the time I’m working on it. But it’s not particularly boring in that it’s kind of neat to see the outcome and satisfying when I’m done with it. Vacuuming — that’s BORING. It’s not particularly hard or effort-filled but it also isn’t interesting. I bought a roomba.

Or an academic example: reading Derrida in French when you don’t really speak French that well is extremely tedious. But it’s not boring, unless you lack the will. The lack of will may be because you’re “implicated” in some way, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no value in doing it anyway.

Not being able to easily read something that’s too hard for you leads to tedium. Not being WILLING to read something you don’t like leads to boredom. Facile things can be boring but are rarely tedious. A student can work past either one of them.

What you’re saying is that there is more benefit in the student’s naive reaction than in the discipline of the stretch, no matter how wearisome. That seems much lazier and more self-aggrandizing than the traditional academic approach: which is to slog through it, understand why it’s valuable to the people who value it, and then articulate, having been there, why you disagree.

Theoretical close readings are, very specifically, about being cognizant of the different lines of implicatedness and able to make sense of texts BOTH independently of them AND dependently of them. The more dextrous a reader is, the more he or she will move in and out of different structures that implicate them. Anybody who can’t do that isn’t Reading; they’re Reacting. The two extremes — the notion of non-implicated reading and the notion of immutably implicated reading — are structurally identical, and you don’t find either one of them in good theory or good literary criticism.

I’m curious if you read the interview, where the interviewer asks him about his notion of fiction?

In your essay ‘Freud and Interpretation’ you reiterate the claim that fictions are “consciously false”, and you borrow the term figura veritas from St. Augustine. The truth can be interpreted through a fiction, and that fictions are necessarily a part of our ‘hermeneutic’ attitude towards the world. Fictions are fundamentally part of the present, and everything we interpret can be understood to be seen through the lens of a present fiction.

It’s that mutability that’s important to Kermode’s way of reading, and I think it’s largely behind his opposition to readings that never really get a clear line of sight through the aesthetic response.

It isn’t really professionalism — my grandmother could read like that and she didn’t have schooling past the 11th grade. It just comes from reading a hell of a lot, very carefully.

Honestly, I think the biggest thing that makes the difference in how well people do it is sentence diagramming, which used to be taught in about the 7th grade.

So where do you draw the line between “professionalism” with its elite connotations and “schooling” period? Seems like what you’re saying isn’t really that different from the naive “working-class elitism” Batuman was bashing in her discussion of Program Fiction…

I’m actually expressing skepticism about the idea of good reading. But good or bad, I still don’t see Kermode drawing the distinction you make between tedium and boredom, no matter how extended your explication of how the terms might (by somebody) be distinguished.

Also, I don’t see Kermode saying anything about naive reading. He’s saying that students find the texts tedious because the texts are coming from a perspective that the students find uncongenial. The issue isn’t that the students don’t understand the texts; it’s that they understand them too well, without the additional blanket obfuscatory approbation they are supposed to bring to great poetry.

I haven’t read much Kermode, including that interview, but his enthusiasm for mutability is of course in keeping with the academic professional commitment to the recognition of ambiguity as the essence of the reading experience. You see both/and from your professional height, while the less cognizant just see one or the other. The difficulty being that the fixed position from which you see both/and is every bit as limiting as every other; the unwillingness to commit to a viewpoint other than mutability is every bit as immutable as insisting that the literal text points to rapture. The lack of prejudice is a prejudice. And Reading in the grip of that prejudice is really just programmatically Reacting, albeit in a professional and therefore validated context.

The things that can be great about academics is that they bring a great deal of knowledge to the topics they write about, which means that they can often make exciting connections and teach you about things you don’t know. The downside of academia is that there’s a tendency to do what Kermode is doing; denigrate people with less knowledge, or with different kinds of knowledge for having different beliefs or preferences — even though those beliefs and preferences are not in fact predicated on knowledge per se.

Or to go at it in another way — the reason Evangelicals think they’re going to be raptured is not reducible to their failure to read all the books Frank Kermode has read. Kermode’s apparent belief that it is is as silly, and as potentially insidious, as the faith in the Rapture which he sneers at.

Reading closely isn’t a solely professional practice, obviously, which is why lit folks like Kermode are so shrill about it. His attempt to claim reading as a professional and transcendent practice is kind of ridiculous, obviously — but that doesn’t mean he isn’t trying to do it.

I could be wrong too…but I doubt your grandmother fetishized dispassionate reading, or that she felt that people who were irritated with Yeats’ politics were somehow lesser readers and were therefore leading us all to destruction, or at least to lesser fulfillment. Kermode’s Reading isn’t a deideologized skill — on the contrary, it’s ideological to the bottom. Close readers who don’t share his views (who read the Bible too closely in the wrong way, or who read Pound closely and say, “Fuck this antisemitic bullshit,”) are denigrated as unworthy.

I don’t usually use the words “good reading” — I use “advanced reading.” I don’t think naive reading is “bad” in some ethical sense. But I also don’t think advanced reading is bad, and it’s significantly more endangered.

This statement:

The difficulty being that the fixed position from which you see both/and is every bit as limiting as every other;

is a pretty good example of what Kermode tends to object to in structuralist readings: it is structurally as limiting, yes. But pragmatically — and politically — that’s seeing the cement rather than the building. Because it would actually, materially, be less limiting, for example, if the people who bully gay children until they commit suicide could see both/and rather than just one…

I definitely don’t think Kermode would have said his position wasn’t ideological. He’d call them “conscious fictions” but he’d also say that they are not dissimilar to Eagleton’s ideology.

I do think he’s specifically saying that his is a BETTER ideology than the current one, which entrenches both naive and hyper-professional perspectives. And he isn’t advocating dispassionate reading — he’s advocating disinterested reading. Which isn’t the same as uninterested reading, or even unimplicated reading. Disinterestedness is ideological. But so is the perspective that you’re taking. And your perspective is also part of the academic establishment, after Theory, just as much as his if not more.

No, of course there are pragmatic and political differences. And sometimes I’d be on Kermode’s side there. Not always, though. As I’ve said to you before, the disinterested application of American professional know-how is not, in all circumstances, less harmful than fundamentalism.

I don’t think the binary “advanced/naive” is necessarily helpful in this situation. There are different readings. They have different practical and ideological content. But being pissed off at Eliot because he’s a political asshole is not necessarily more naive than setting that to one side in order to revel in the stately prance of his prosody. You could argue that the reverse is the case, in fact.

Real quick– when Noah mentioned this, I was certain he was talking about the insane literary critic protagonist of Nabokov’s Pale Fire. And I’m still not totally certain that’s not who you’re discussing.

James is a fine cartoonist and was inspired to make something that, as it turned out, will have a wonderful lasting impression on comics and my local community…CCS.

However, James has been of the habit of suggesting others adhere to his approaches to the artistic process. To often in my experience impractical, inefficient or unauthentic methods when applied to other fine cartoonists. So many take his suggestions with a grain of salt. Sammy Harkham eludes to this side of James in Crickets #2. This is often in the context of the classroom and is contradictory to what we now know helps motivate student’s individual processes.

He is well intentioned and can be quite effective for those who share his ideals. Nevertheless, others come away paralyzed, angered, belittled, bewildered, discouraged or worse unaffected by his opinions on their artistic process, intelligence, world citizenship, and now apparently psychological strength (which as the son of a Psycologist, I am just rejecting outright).

So when James shares his inspiration to go offline with, Diane Sawyer and Slate, or that it is our job as young cartoonists to dethrone older cartoonist while nurturing said cartoonists, or recommends against institutional cartooning education while working in a cartooning school, or tells us it is psychologically necessary for us to cartoon or write more then we read, when most of us can do both and are reading and writing more then ever, do to the Internet…well, I just say, “oh, that James Sturm….”

That remark of Sturm’s echoes a remark of Jim Steranko from years ago, in the negative…Steranko said that every time he created something, he destroyed something to compensate. Say he made a drawing, he’d then rip up a magazine.

The truth is they are both brilliant cartoonists. As part of thier process it is both interesting and valid, perhaps essential. For Dave Sim it is piece and quiet.

I don’t assume to know the rules, but I do know each artistic process, solution to ethical dilema and method of intellectual approach is subject to a limitation equal to the number of those persuing them. Create, Consume and Destroy, in isolated silence or naked broadcasted over the web as loudly as possible. What maters is that the process works for you, utilizes your strengths to resolve your issues and build up your weaknesses in an effort to connect with your world. Impacting and reflecting it in anyway that pushes us forward and leaves an impresion that minimally has no lasting harm, and ideally benefit those left behind.